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Creative directors and friends, Nontando Mposo and Yolanda Matyolo are proud African women who not only love fashion, but who execute style in their daily work and play lives.

Seeing a gap in the market for functional, classic, on trend pieces in traditional African prints, journalist Nontando and town planner, Yolanda, found that the natural progression was for them to fill this gap in cultural aesthetics, and embark on this journey which has now manifested as Noyo Closet.

Sourcing fabric all over Africa, the prints Noyo Closet use include kente, ankara, shweshwe and kanga. Clients are encouraged to select the fabric of their choice and submit which design they would like the garment to be styled in, and Noyo Closet will take exact measurements, and spin their magic.

With a successful launch held in May, a notable presence in the media and at fashion events in Cape Town, most recently the Mercedes-Benz Bokeh Fashion Film Festival(where the team were given Style Africa’s Best Dressed nod!); Noyo Closet are set to take Cape Town, South Africa and eventually Africa by storm with their distinctly ethnic print style spun with a modern, edgy, functional twist.

To order your custom made garments contact noyocloset@gmail.com

For updates on new fabrics, events, sales etc, follow them on @NoyoCloset and Like their Noyo Closet Facebook page.

“I was in the winter of my life- and the men I met along the road were my only summer. At night I fell sleep with visions of myself dancing and laughing and crying with them. Three years down the line of being on an endless world tour and memories of them were the only things that sustained me, and my only real happy times. I was a singer, not a very popular one, who once had dreams of becoming a beautiful poet- but upon an unfortunate series of events saw those dreams dashed and divided like a million stars in the night sky that I wished on over and over again- sparkling and broken. But I really didn’t mind because I knew that it takes getting everything you ever wanted and then losing it to know what true freedom is.

When the people I used to know found out what I had been doing, how I had been living- they asked me why. But there’s no use in talking to people who have a home, they have no idea what its like to seek safety in other people, for home to be wherever you lay your head.

I was always an unusual girl, my mother told me that I had a chameleon soul. No moral compass pointing me due north, no fixed personality. Just an inner indecisiveness that was as wide as wavering as the ocean. And if I said that I didn’t plan for it to turn out this way I’d be lying- because I was born to be the other woman. I belonged to no one- who belonged to everyone, who had nothing- who wanted everything with a fire for every experience and an obsession for freedom that terrified me to the point that I couldn’t even talk about- and pushed me to a nomadic point of madness that both dazzled and dizzied me.

Every night I used to pray that I’d find my people- and finally I did- on the open road. We have nothing to lose, nothing to gain, nothing we desired anymore- except to make our lives into a work of art.

Who are you?
Are you in touch with all of your darkest fantasies?
Have you created a life for yourself where you can experience them?
I have. I am fucking crazy.
But I am free.’

Mean Girls should only ever be a parody. In real life, that Mean Girls movement is not sustainable, at all. I believe it is meant as a social commentary on how women grow up and are trained to compete and tear one another down from the time they hit high school. I don’t feel it was meant to be seen as a behavioral model for young girls and women to aspire to.

It’s a step backward for grown women to constantly demean other women, even subtly. Don’t we have enough of that from the upper echelons of modern day society? It is basically taking everything which women who pioneered for us did in various fields, and doing a silent flushing of an entire movement down the proverbial toilet, undoing a lot of blood, sweat and tears endured by previous generations of feminist stalwarts, so that our gender can progress. In reality it doesn’t serve a purpose other than spreading and creating unnecessary hate , but yet it happens, mostly out of social conditioning and general insecurity. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie points out, society raises women to see each other as the enemy. A conditioning which is engineered to get us to be so busy breaking each other down, that we don’t utilize that energy to be GROUND BREAKING WOMEN.

I want to be a ground breaking woman.

As women, I feel we often miss the opportunity to create allies out of one another in the form of support and encouragement, in favor of just being mean spirited with snarky remarks and subtle snideness. We victimize one another without realizing it, then we turn around and shout SISTERHOOD. I have been guilty of this a while back but I feel that with growing up and changing your role in society, with younger folks looking up to us, comes a LOT of responsibility. So I am cementing my position as a SUPPORTER of women, not a BREAKER of them.

“We raise girls to see each other as competitors
Not for jobs or for accomplishments
Which I think can be a good thing
But for the attention of men
We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings
In the way that boys are
Feminist: the person who believes in the social
Political, and economic equality of the sexes.”

If you down with the rich man, and that can be rich in anything
Don’t you take too much
If you laugh at a poor man, and that can be poor in anything
Don’t you laugh too much
If you trying to be rich man, and that can be rich in anything
Don’t you take too much
And if you need to be needed, and you’re looking for purpose
Just remember, don’t you need too much…

If you take something you, don’t need, and keep it,
Then you’ve stolen from somebody else who’s hungry,
Everything that you do, is everything you are,
Everything that I am, is everything you’ll ever need.

Money can buy power, but it can’t buy respect;

Money can’t buy sleep, but it can buy a bed
Money can’t buy you love, but it can buy sex
Do you posses money or by money are you possessed?
Money can buy a house, but it can’t buy a home
So even with money you still feel all alone
Money can buy you friends, but it can’t buy family
Money can’t make you happy, that’s just a fallacy
It can buy a bath, but it can’t buy purity
It can buy bodyguards, but it can’t buy security
While people around the world starve, I eat

Cause money can buy war, but it can’t buy peace
Some do everything and anything to get the p’sThe society we living in, it’s a necessity
It’s got the power to turn your best friends to enemies
It’s funny cause money doesn’t follow us when we leave

Does happiness live in a mansion with a swimming pool?
I know people with plenty of money that are miserable
We all need to earn in this world we live
Most work for it, some steal, but many worship it
Some sell poison for it, some seek employment for it
We need it to survive, so some clean the toilets for it
I need papes to live but never will I live for paper
Abolish the Queen, I don’t wanna see that witch’s face
Many sell their soul for it, no not me
Some will try to tell you that it doesn’t grow on trees
I heard the saying said, many a time, but they were wrong
Cause if it doesn’t tell me then where do you get the paper from?
Most think they will be happy if they only had more of it
Some waste it, some feel more important because they’re born with it
Some have got the nerve to say you’re fraudulent for forging it
The truth is you don’t need a fortune to be fortunate.